How when AWS was down, we were not

On the other hand, saying “Untested code is never released” is a pretty bold statement, even if I understand the good intent

The point here is that, it's important to clarify what you mean by "untested code". Some companies release untested code all the time to production by hide their usage behind feature flags. They admit that the code has not been tested.

Code that we release behind feature flags has been tested, the only reason something goes out on a flag is when we don't want to release it to everyone yet, for product reasons, not technical ones.

Again going back to "untested", when code gets merged, no one ever says "well taht was untested". But what does tested mean? Of course it means that everyone who is accountable for the code believes it was tested. It's subjective, so there can be no other answer.